For the last few hundred years, one of the most fundamental principles in physics has been that energy is conserved. You simply can’t get it from nowhere. Every experimentally tested physical theory from Newton’s laws to Maxwell’s equations and beyond is completely consistent with energy conservation. Noether’s theorem makes the possibility of an error in our understanding of energy conservation even more unlikely.
None of this has deterred people from trying to invent perpetual motion or other free energy / “over unity” devices. “What if the scientists are wrong? They’ve been wrong before. They should at least give serious examination and consideration to my idea.” say the hopeful inventors. I can understand their perspective. It’s frustrating and offputting to be met with an eye-roll and a “You’re wrong” with no friendliness or consideration. It’s also frustrating and offputting for the scientists to keep being approached by people who are wrong (and often belligerent), and the cycle feeds on itself. Even worse are the outright fraudulent companies preying on unfortunate investors, and the media which is often so spectacularly ignorant that you can’t tell if they’ve been fooled by fraud or just screwed up a real research story so badly that it seems to be claiming something it’s not. Swans on Tea recently noted an instance of one of these, though it’s hard to tell which one.
To avoid this, I have a suggestion for those people who are trying to build a free energy machine and want to be taken seriously. There’s two issues to resolve. You have to make sure you’re not fooling yourself about what your device can do, and you have to make sure that it’s easy for a scientist to see that the device can do what you say. Here therefore is the Built on Facts Protocol for testing perpetual motion or free energy. It is a literal instantiation of a black box test.
- Put the machine in a completely closed box. Metal and airtight is preferred, but not required. Absolutely nothing can be connecting the outside of the box to the inside of the box under any circumstances.
- Attach a standard light bulb socket to the outside of the box, with the wiring running into the inside of the box to the power output of your free energy machine. If your device does not produce 120VAC at 60Hz, attach a small generator, inverter, or whatever else is required to provide the appropriate power. If this is too onerous in terms of total wattage, a small 12V bulb or even a LED is acceptable. Try to use as high an output power as possible, as the difficulty of step 3 is inversely proportional to the power output. When your device is running, the bulb must remain unambiguously lit.
- The device must run and the light must shine continuously for the amount of time T in seconds given below without outside intervention of any kind.
T = (34,600,000,000)(V/P)
Where V is the volume of the box in cubic meters and P is the power of the bulb in watts. So if your bulb is a 120W light and the box is 1 cubic meter, you’ll need the device to power the bulb for 9 years. Now most people don’t have 9 years to wait. You can take this figure down quite a bit by ramping up the power and shrinking the size of the box. If you can fit your invention into one cubic foot and power a 1000W halogen you’ll only have to operate for about 11 days. I understand this is quite a difficult requirement but there is a concrete reason for it. It could be worse - perpetual means forever, after all.
What is the reason? Why 34,600,000,000 for the constant? That’s the energy density of gasoline in joules per cubic meter. The box ensures that you’re probably not inadvertently connecting to some outside source of energy. The large time constant ensures that you’re probably not using some internal energy storage. If you can run for the required time with no contact or input from the outside, you pass the test and the device is worth a more careful examination by a qualified scientist.
Best of luck.
8 responses so far ↓
1 Uncle Al // Jun 17, 2008 at 10:35 am
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/htoo.htm
The secret to Energy-Plus! is to feed off dissipation and impedence rather than gains. It works for management, doesn’t it?
2 Uncle Al // Jun 17, 2008 at 3:56 pm
sigh.
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/crap.htm
3 Peter Morgan // Jun 18, 2008 at 8:48 am
Noether’s theorem reduces the possibility of “free energy” to zero, but the way it works is by definition. If we manage to get some “free energy”, the process we use to get the free energy will give us clues about the degrees of freedom that we had not hitherto included in our models. Include more degrees of freedom in our models, then the energy isn’t free any more, and we have to worry about entropy again, … .
Nuclear energy looks pretty much free if we don’t know about binding energies in the nucleus, but it’s not free once we model internal degrees of freedom of the nucleus.
I note that your protocol #1 contradicts your protocol #2 (for which wires come out of the box to power the bulb). That’s a legalistic quibble, but people build their free energy machines using quibbles (a 10 quibble machine is presumably less good than a 1 quibble machine).
Surely the constant should be predicated on the E=mc^2 of say 10^4 kg of matter, not the chemical energy of petroleum?
4 Peter Morgan // Jun 18, 2008 at 8:55 am
In lieu of being able to edit my last, I meant to say, a matter density of 10^4 kg/m^3 == an energy density of 10^4*c^2=~10^21 kg/m/s^2.
5 Mandy // Oct 23, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Well written article.
6 Tess // Oct 27, 2008 at 8:50 am
Good post.
7 John Laccohee-Joslin // Jan 20, 2009 at 12:12 am
Dear Sirs,
I have just watched a video of a man in the U.S.A. with a motor that runs using magnetic force.
This operated by him moving a lever up and down and he was going to develope a set of gears to replace the movement he created.
The method he was going to use could and should be much more simple and produce a lot less friction that the gears.
The method I came up with also takes into consideration sync problems.
I would also like to say that there are a great deal of people out there working towards this aim, most of which have all come up with basically the same layout.
I would dearly like to see a much bigger coverage by all areas making it easy to contact people involved and to share a common interest.
This can only be promoted by a much more front page atitude by the media and web sites.
By this I would much prefer to get e-mails about this sort of thing rather than a whole lot of rubbish about viagra etc and replica watches and scamming.
All of these seem to find their way on to every computer where as the videos I have watched are so hard to download and colate.
There was also one video that I watched by a american company who have built a power uuit that they will install into homes (U.S.A.) I presume that realy does work and will be instralled free of charge because the extra electricity can be sold to the grid.
how about making that front page!
Or the fact that there is a gentleman in Australia with a working unit as well.
Regards
John Laccohee-Joslin
8 vance brown // Sep 5, 2009 at 2:18 am
i say “more power to the people” There is indeed a lot of scam artist out there, so do your homework before you send ANYONE your money! look into the better business burea’s database to see if such companies for real or no more than just a “paper corporation” my best wishes to the coomon man working on a dream!
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